Fortunately the openness of Linux still provides us with one way out of this problem. Although you can use modern Linux desktops and servers without knowing almost anything about how computers, networks or Linux itself works, unlike with other systems, Linux still will show you everything that's going on behind the scenes if you are willing to look. You can set up complex networks of Linux servers running the same services that power the internet—all for free (and with the power of virtualization, all from a single machine). For the budding engineer who is willing to dive deep into Linux, you will have superior knowledge and an edge over all of your peers.

DietPi makes it extremely easy to turn a single board computer into many different things. Installing and configuring Nextcloud, Kodi, etc., only require a few very basic steps. Every software package I tried installed with few issues, and worked great once installed. DietPi does almost all the hard work for the user, which makes it a great option for running on any single board computer or as a virtual machine. If you are looking for a lightweight and easy-to-use operating system for your single board computer, you cannot go wrong with DietPi.

While we're still waiting on an AMD-powered Chromebook as well as for Cannonlake to materialize, it appears Google is prepping support for a Geminilake Chromebook as well.

Gemini Lake was launched back in December and makes use of Goldmont Plus CPU cores with Gen9 (Kabylake) class graphics. The current Gemini Lake mobile parts are the Celeron N4000/N4100 and Pentium Silver N5000. The Celeron models are dual core while the Pentium Silver N5000 is quad-core, all of them have a 6 Watt TDP, 1.1GHz base frequency, and turbo frequency in the 2.4~2.7GHz range while the graphics clock up only to 650~750MHz.

Botched updates keep making the rounds these days, and here’s a new one that was actually released in December, but whose effects haven’t been spotted until this month.

Windows 10 update KB4058043, which is released to systems running the Fall Creators Update, brings reliability improvements to the Microsoft Store and fixes an issue which Microsoft says could cause app update failures and unnecessary network requests.

But as it turns out, it also brings new problems to a number of systems installing it. A post on Microsoft’s Community forums, which got pinned earlier this week – meaning that it’s really an issue that all users should be aware of, reveals that Windows 10 update KB4058043 caused BSODs on a system before eventually pushing it to an unbootable state.

Whenever I encounter incredibly stupid and functionally destructive configuration errors like this I tend to believe they're down to simple incompetence and not malice.

But this one has me wondering. If you essentially require incoming mail to include the contents of spf.outlook.com (currently no less than 81 subnets) as valid senders for the domain, you are essentially saying that only outlook.com customers are allowed to communicate.

If that restriction is a result of a deliberate choice rather than a simple configuration error, the problem moves out of the technical sphere and could conceivably become a legal matter, depending on what outlook.com have specified in their contracts that they are selling to their customers.

Back for Mesa 18.0 there was OpenGL bindless textures for Kepler GPUs on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver while now for Mesa 18.1 that support is in place for Maxwell GPUs and newer.

Bindless texture support is important for "AZDO" purposes for approaching zero driver overhead with OpenGL. ARB_bindless_texture reduces the API/GL driver overhead of resource bindings and allows accessing textures without needing to first bind/re-bind them.

Yesterday well known open-source AMD developer Marek Olšák landed his RadeonSI 32-bit pointers support for freeing up some scalar general purpose registers (SGPRs) and he's continued with a new patch series to alleviate register usage even more.

Should you find yourself using the xf86-video-vesa DDX for one reason or another, a new release is now available and it's the first in three years.

The xf86-video-vesa 2.4.0 X.Org driver was released this week with the handful of commits that came in since v2.3.4 was tagged three years ago, it's been eight years already since xf86-video-vesa 2.3.0. For most users, xf86-video-vesa is just used in select fallback instances when your main DDX driver fails but even still these days KMS is pretty solid with xf86-video-modesetting, fbdev and other DDX drivers working well, etc.

GA_Switcheroo is the Linux kernel component for dealing with MUX'ed and MUX-less hybrid graphics laptops/systems for switching between GPUs. A new patch series is working to modernize and improve VGA Switcheroo.

Announcing a new -ck release, 4.15-ck1 with the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler, version 0.170. These are patches designed to improve system responsiveness and interactivity with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable for any workload.

While Canonical is no longer involved in Unity 8 development, the community-driven UBports team continues working on their "Unity 8" and "Ubuntu Touch" efforts with a hope to deliver a developer ISO soon.

Sadly the Yunit project that also forked Unity 8's code-base doesn't seem to be active at least not regularly anymore, but the UBports team is working on delivering. In their latest Q&A session they share that Unity 8 on the desktop is coming together. One of the developers commented, "While it's both good and pretty, it's not 'pretty good'."

Besides Mir 0.30 being released this week, other Mir progress was also made by these Canonical developers working on forging Mir into a viable Wayland compositor.

Gerry Boland of Canonical's Mir team has shared that Snapd 2.31 now supports any Snap implementing the Wayland interface. This allows for Mir to be shipped as a Snap and support Wayland clients using Canonical's app sandboxing approach alternative to Flatpaks.

Surprising as it might sound, there are still computers using the traditional Sys V init system, and there probably will be until systemd start working on Hurd and FreeBSD. The upstream project still exist, though, and up until today, the upstream source was available from Savannah via subversion. I am happy to report that this just changed.

Seems Debian is talking about why they are unable to package whole categories of modern software, such as anything using npm. It's good they're having a conversation about that, and I want to give a broader perspective.

This weekend, those interested in Debian development have been having a discussion on the debian-devel mailing list about "What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?". I'm commenting on that in my blog rather than the mailing list, since this got a bit too long to be usefully done in an email.

OpenRA [Official Site], the fantastic open source game engine for classic Westwood strategy games has its first full release this year. When reading what's changed, you might be thinking this is some kind of Déjà vu, that's because we covered the test release from January as well.

A casual kart racing game currently in early access, Hibby Kart aims to replicate an experience similar to old N64 karting games such as Diddy Kong Racing. The game is built in Unity Engine while the visuals and animations look pretty slick. My first run on the starting track had me collecting what appear to be Bitcoins (I am unsure if that is intentional) which level up your kart.

Even so, Mac and Linux together making up nearly 10% of their overall sales is certainly nothing to sneeze at, especially if you're not making a huge amount of sales, to me that says they're quite important.

Some of you may have already wondered why there were no Wine Staging releases lately and whether anything has changed. There are indeed some major changes, which we want to explain in this post. Before doing so, let us take a quick look at the history of this project.

Wine Staging originated from Pipelight, a software to use Windows browser plugins in Linux/FreeBSD web browsers. In order to support Silverlight and its DRM system PlayReady, we had to create our own Wine version as the development code did not support storing Access Control Lists (ACLs) for files. It turned out that getting the support into the development version was quite difficult and Erich E. Hoover tried this since 2012. We figured out that there must be more patches that are considered as too experimental for the development branch and started with Wine Staging in 2014. While the project got larger and larger in roughly 120 releases, the maintenance effort also increased, especially since we follow the 2 week release cycle of the development branch.

There have been many people asking questions about the future of Wine Staging, turns out it's no longer going to have any new releases.

I won't quote the entire post titled "Future of Wine Staging", but the gist of it is that they just don't have the spare time to put into it now. They have full time jobs, so naturally that doesn't leave much for something like this. I fully understand their situation and wish them all the best, I've seen so many people appreciate the work they did to bring so many different patches together for testing.

The good news, is that there's already a fork available. On top of that, Wine developer Alexandre Julliard posted on the Wine mailing list about keeping it going in some form, so there might be light at the end of the tunnel.

Wine-Staging as many of you have known it for the past four years is unfortunately no more. We'll see if other reliable folks step up to maintain this experimental version of Wine but the original developers have sadly stepped away.

Less than two weeks after demonstrating an exploit that allows Linux to be loaded unto a Nintendo Switch game console, fail0verflow is back with a new video showing what appears to be a full-fledged GNU/Linux-based operating system running on Nintendo’s tablet.

The video shows a Switch running the KDE Plasma desktop environment, complete with support for touchscreen input, internet connectivity, and 3D graphics.

​LMMS stands for Linux Multimedia Studio. It is a very good open-source program that is used to create music tracks using sound files, predefined instruments, and sound effects. LMMS has versions for Windows and macOS in addition to Linux. Their website, of course, lists all of their features offered to users. This article will attempt to provide practical guides and tips for composing songs using LMMS.

Having to type the same command over and over again can be a daunting task and tiresome for that matter. The shell scripts are really easy to create and run saving you from a lot of misery and anguish if you really prefer using the terminal over using the GUI for running tasks.

Uncovered by Kromtech Security Center, the parent company of MacKeeper Security, the breach exposed data such as passport information, driver's licenses and other high profile security IDs, all of which were hosted on a password-less Amazon S3 storage server.

they include The City University of New York (cuny.edu), Uncle Sam's court information portal (uscourts.gov), Lund University (lu.se), the UK's Student Loans Company (slc.co.uk), privacy watchdog The Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) and the Financial Ombudsman Service (financial-ombudsman.org.uk), plus a shedload of other .gov.uk and .gov.au sites, UK NHS services, and other organizations across the globe.

Remember now, it is a Police Force that allowed their website to be hijacked by this simple attack vector. The authority assigned to serve and protect. More specifically, the authority that argues that wiretapping is totally safe because the Police is competent in IT security matters, so there’s no risk whatsoever your data will leak or be mishandled.

This is one of the websites that were trivially hacked [sic].

It gives pause for thought.

It also tells you what you already knew: authorities can’t even keep their own dirtiest laundry under wraps, so the notion that they’re capable or even willing to protect your sensitive data is hogwash of the highest order.

In a bid to help domain registrars comply with the GDPR regulations, ICANN has floated several proposals, all of which would redact some of the registrant data from WHOIS records. Its mildest proposal would remove the registrant’s name, email, and phone number, while allowing self-certified 3rd parties to request access to said data at the approval of a higher authority — such as the registrar used to register the domain name.

The most restrictive proposal would remove all registrant data from public WHOIS records, and would require legal due process (such as a subpoena or court order) to reveal any information supplied by the domain registrant.

Federal law enforcement officials in the United States have recently renewed their periodic demands for legislation to regulate encryption. While they offer few technical specifics, their general proposal—that vendors must retain the ability to decrypt for law enforcement the devices they manufacture or communications their services transmit—presents intractable problems that would-be regulators must not ignore.

It’s finally out ! Michael W Lucas is one of the best authors of technical books out there. I was curious about this new edition. It is not a reference book, but covers the practical aspects of SSH that I wish everybody knew. Rather than aggregating different articles/blogs on SSH, this book covers 90% of the common use cases for SSH that you will ever encounter.

So far, it's a relatively benign, easy introduction to a new operating system that blends the familiar and new in a timid package. Perhaps that's the goal, because a radical offering would right away scare everyone. Amazon Linux 2 is an appealing concept, as it gives users what Red Hat never quite did (yet) - A Fedora-like bleeding-edge tech with the stability and long-term support of the mainstay enterprise offering. But then, it also pulls a Debian/Ubuntu stunt by breaking ABI, so it will be cubicle to those who enjoying living la vida loco (in their cubicle or open-space prison).

Having lived and breathed the large-scale HPC world for many years, I am quite piqued to see how this will evolve. Performance, stability and ease of use will be my primary concerns. Then, is it possible to hook up a remote virtual machine into the EC2 hive? That's another experiment, and I'd like to see if scaling and deployment works well over distributed networks. Either way, even if nothing comes out of it, Amazon Linux 2 is a nice start to a possibly great adventure. Or yet another offspring in the fragmented family we call Linux. Time will tell. Off you go. Cloud away.

The Document Foundation announced recently that its LibreOffice 6.0 open-source and cross-platform office suite reached almost 1 million downloads since its release last month on January 31, 2018.

That's terrific news for the Open Source and Free Software community and a major milestone for the acclaimed LibreOffice office suite, which tries to be a free alternative to proprietary solutions like Microsoft Office.

The 1 million downloads mark was reached just two weeks after the release of LibreOffice 6.0, which is the biggest update ever of the open-source office suite adding numerous new features and enhancements over previous versions.

Landing in FreeBSD today was the mitigation work for the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities.

It's taken a few more weeks longer than most of the Linux distributions to be re-worked for Spectre/Meltdown mitigation as well as DragonFlyBSD, but with FreeBSD Revision 329462 it appears their initial fixes are in place.

There is Meltdown mitigation for Intel CPUs via a KPTI implementation similar to Linux, the Kernel Page Table Isolation. There is also a PCID (Process Context Identifier) optimization for Intel Westmere CPUs and newer, just as was also done on Linux.

More in Tux Machines

Why open source could be IBM's key to future success in the cloud

Do those same developers need IBM? Developers certainly benefit from IBM's investments in open source, but it's not as clear that those same developers have much to gain from IBM's cloud. Google, for example, has done a stellar job open sourcing code like TensorFlow and Kubernetes that feeds naturally into running related workloads on Google Cloud Platform. Aside from touting its Java bonafides, however, IBM has yet to demonstrate that developers get significant benefits for modern workloads on its cloud.
That's IBM's big challenge: Translating its open source expertise into real, differentiated value for developers on its cloud.

Top 8 Debian-Based Distros

Most people tend to forget that despite Ubuntu's success over the years, it's still just a distro based on another distro - Debian. Debian on its own, however, isn't really well suited for newer users...hence the explosion of distros based on Debian over the recent years. There are lot of great choices for Linux users. Which one is best for you?

Compact, rugged IoT gateway offers dual GbE with PoE

Inforce has launched a $250 “Inforce 6320” IoT gateway that runs Linux on a quad -A53 Snapdragon 410, and offers WiFi, BT, GPS, HDMI, USB, -30 to 85°C support, and dual GbE ports with PoE.
Inforce Computing’s $250 Inforce 6320 is a compact (170 x 95 x 42mm) IoT gateway that runs Ubuntu Core (Snappy) and Debian on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410E. Inforce promises “periodic upstream kernel based BSP releases [that] include in-depth documentation along with a host of royalty-free software.” The Debian BSP includes LXDE, drivers for all available interfaces, as and access to the Inforce TechWeb tech support services.